Love and communication

Our weekday mornings pretty much suck a bag of rocks. Every. Single. Day.

I cannot wait for Saturday for multiple reasons, but most of all, because it's just so much easier. We have no fights about getting dressed, no struggles to get out the door, no tantrums about staying hooooooome. 

Jordan does not not not want to go to school. His level of cooperation ranges from mildly whiny to flat out belligerent.

He's had a rough couple of months health-wise, and so he's been home a lot. Which only serves to make him want to be home more.

Last month we spent the better part of an afternoon and evening in the ER because his pediatrician was afraid he might have appendicitis.  He's had a number of ear infections. Monday night I got home and he had a fever of 104.4 degrees, so he was out school for a couple days.

And the fact is, he likes his teachers, and he's fine with the other kids, but he would just as soon never go back there again.

Jordan is one of the youngest in his class. He's a big kid, but he's such a little boy. He walks in sucking his thumb. He still cries at drop-off sometimes. It makes me so sad. It makes me think we started him too young.

But with DC offering pre-school, and him getting in to one we liked, it meant not paying approximately $1,600 in day care every month. Which is huge, you know?

I remind myself that his teachers like him, and so do the other kids in his class. His school is friendly, and the staff are kind. He's in his peer group - just younger by months.

And then in the morning, I try to remind myself that he's three and a half, that he's just a little kid. This is hard in the moment when he's making the morning miserable, when we're scrambling to get everyone out the door and he is so deliberately working against us.


As contrasted with India, who is also working against us, but mainly because, oh! Shoes! would be so much more fun in mouth than on feet! And such.

I  have a hard enough time hauling myself out of bed and looking somewhat presentable for the office. Just me. I need the added complication like I need a suit of chain mail.

Somehow we do manage to get out the door every morning. Rarely on time, rarely without some degree of drama trauma. But we all get to school, daycare, work. Eventually.

This morning Nick called on the way to work and said Jordan was fine. Once they left the house, Nick had kept him chatting, and all had gone smoothly with drop-off.

He still wasn't happy to be there, though.

Nick said, "I get it. I hated going to school when I was a kid. Every day, ever year. I hated it."

"I know; you've told me. And I bet you were just as big a dick about it every morning as he is."

Which is probably true. But never needs to be said out loud.

And I'd be all, "You should know we run a clean dungeon around here..."

What do you imagine you would do if you left your current job?

It used to be that whenever I’d get sick of my office job, I’d think, well, you know, I could always turn to foot prostitution.

Since writing that long-ago post, however, I’ve been informed by a variety of foot fetishists that in fact, I could not. I don’t  have the feet for it.

Seriously.

Which, you know, is kind of like being told that I’d be a bad lesbian. I want to be all, I would so be good at it! But, I’m trying to work more within my limitations. Plus my husband is completely opposed to the idea.

So the other night we were talking about what I might actually do if I weren’t in my current job. I was trying to come up with business ideas. One possibility for me would, of course, be freelance writing and editing. Which Nick suggested.

“What about something totally different?” I asked.

Because, you know, I spend my days writing and editing. And while I like it, I kind of feel like if I’m not writing my own stuff, why would I leave a good job to do the same thing, but without colleagues or benefits? If I do something else, I want to do something completely else.

“Which would be…what?”

(Nick, it must be said, gets a little tired of my existential crises.)

“Maybe I could be a dominatrix! It's not about sex.”

“Huh.” It was one of those, fuck, not this kind of random mental masturbation conversations again huhs.

“Listen! We could stop renting out our basement, and turn it into a dungeon! We could have different theme rooms!”

Nick just looked at me, poured himself more wine, saying nothing.

"Yes! I could be all, 'And here's the laundry room, where we'll be spending our next hour...'"

This intrigued him. "And then you'd make him iron naked!"

"While I stepped on his feet in spiky heels!"

"And then you could start a laundry service..."

Pretty much.

The opposite of making out with a teenage boy

At the risk of sounding antediluvian, does anyone remember those cigarette vending machines? The kind with the pull-out knobs?

I can't imagine they would still have them, would they?

(They, of course, being...them?)

Yah, so I'm still nursing India. And I haven't started smoking. Or making out with teenage boys. In fact, I hadn't even thought about doing so until the other night.

Because there we were like every evening, my daughter and I, sitting in the dark, having a nurse and cuddle before her bedtime.

She was lying on her side, firmly affixed to my boob, one hand tucked around back of my body.

Jordan, when he was nursing, was always so focused on nursing. He ate and ate and ate and then he was all, oh, so tired! Need to sleep!

India. However. She turns out to be a multi-tasker.

Because yes, she's eating. But much like I eat lunch at my desk and surf the Internet and answer a phone call, there she is, flailing around with her free hand.

The rogue hand. Is how I now think of it.

Because we could be sitting there having a sweet moment in the dark. It could be lovely and relaxing.

But instead, I spend my time fending off the rogue hand.

The hand that reaches over to my other nipple and GRONK! pulls it like a vending machine nob. And then whacks my cheek. Pokes me in the mouth. Pokes my lip. Picks my teeth. Pulls my hair. Pats my boobs. Rubs my stomach.

In any of the above order. And repeatedly.

So we do this elaborate wrestling sort of dance in the dark, my kid and I. I follow the hand and block. In this case out of self-preservation rather than modesty or shyness or whatever else kept my clothes on way back then.

So there we were, like every night, and it suddenly occurred to me that my daughter is just as handsy as a teenage boy. But with an antipodal agenda.

She already has the naked boob. It is everywhere else she is up for groping.

Skip to my Lou, my darlin'

Would it bug you to have insects in your sugar shaker?

(Also. This has nothing to do with collecting dead bugs for the office - which, let's be clear, I never actually did.)

So, the sugar. Plastic ones, I mean. Not real live or even dead ones. Because that would just be obviously gross, and who wouldn't be bothered by that?

Now that I say that, I realize that there are cultures that do eat beetles and crickets and such. Plus there are the maggot and mite cheeses.

And actually, if you have ever eaten insects, I'd love to hear about it. But for all of you who have not, who might not be all, ooh, ants! Tasty! Would it bother you?

Because, here's the thing. We've always had plastic insects around the house. Betty is fond of them. If you came to stay at their house, you might find a rubber cockroach on your pillow, or a plastic cricket in your napkin.

So when she realized that her plastic ants were just the right size to live in the sugar shaker and not fall through the hole in the top, they went directly in. And when I saw a package of plastic flies, I knew just who to buy them for.

And then she moved in with her sugar shakers, and now her bugs are our bugs.

Nick, however, is not so much on the bugs.

This past weekend he cleaned the shaker, washed the bugs, and set them aside. "The joke has been played," he said. "Can we now get rid of the bugs?"

Now, every once in a while someone notices them and jumps. When Kelli was in town for our high school reunion, she walked over to me holding the sugar.

"I know I'm drunk, but am I hallucinating? Are there tiny little spiders in here?"

By now, they are kind of like decoration. When someone is surprised by them, it's a bonus, but that's not what it's about. I like them. Nick, he does not.

But I mean, really. What's the bug deal?

Robert's got a quick hand. He'll look around the room, he won't tell you his plan.

Yesterday at the office, I heard an unfamiliar voice raised in anger. I cannot remember the words, but the tone was threatening.

I whispered to my Quad-mates, "Who is that?"

One of my colleagues, sitting nearer the office from whence the voice emanated said she thought it was someone recounting a story, not an actual argument. As there was then conversation and no further angry utterances, I strolled that direction - past the office, to the next one over. I ducked in and asked a friend of mine what he thought had happened.

He said a visitor was talking to our colleague in the next office, and she was talking about something like an accident she was in, and repeating the harsh words of the altercation.

Which is not so interesting. Here's what I did find interesting, however.

All of us in my corner were immediately on guard, clenched, poised for escape. One woman said she had her phone in her hand, and she knew exactly where she was heading.

I said I would run for the stairs, but another colleague pointed out that that would necessitate crossing the hallway, and it's a long, open, straight shot down the hall. Whereas we could climb over our cupboards and hide in a back room.

One of our colleagues watches a lot of CSI and some other show I didn't know. She pointed out that we should figure out the duct work.

Which, if I can't make it to the stairs, seems like a great idea to me.

Seriously, world?